Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Creating Cities of the Future

Remember the movie WALL-E? Everyone was evacuated from Earth to live on a fully automated luxury spaceship to spend five years on a cruise in space while the earth was cleaned up by an army of robots - WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth Class). But in the movie the earth is still covered in trash seven hundred years later. Could this really happen? Can man build a spaceship that could sustain life in outer space for seven hundred years?

Children watch cartoons and movies with elaborate futuristic worlds. What if you asked students to create a new city for the future? Where would students choose to build a city? What would the city be like? How would the city be built? Would students create a city where everything could be easily controlled by computers? What would students include in their cities – housing, food, schools, entertainment, and jobs? Lots of questions.

Do you think only cartoons and movies have futuristic worlds? Let’s look at The Seasteading Institute: http://www.seasteading.org/In February the Seasteading Institute announced a contest for architects, engineers, students and hobbyists to design a seastead, a permanent, stationary structure that is specifically designed for long-term living in a marine environment. Participants were given a patented 3-D model of a seasteading platform to create an architectural design. The winners were announced May 18, 2009.

Students can create 3D models and share them with their friends. There are Training Videos, a warehouse of models that people have created to give students ideas, and a section that covers a list of features. Teachers can access the K-12 SketchUp for Educators section to learn about the free version and the Pro version.http://sketchup.google.com/industries/education.html